Renumber Enums with Regular Expressions

We had a widely-used assembly with an enumeration that did not have explicitly assigned values that was being released from multiple branches and causing problems. In an effort to keep the enumerations synchronized across projects, explicit values were added. The problem is that the values started at 1, whereas the implicit counter starts at 0. The solution is simple: renumber ’em to start at 0. Sounds like a job for regular expressions!

I was really hoping that I could do this using regular expressions in VS2012’s find & replace, but I just couldn’t find a way to implement the necessary arithmetic. After floundering for 15 minutes or so, I decided to just write a simple script in LINQPad. Here’s what I came up with, and it works fantastically.

var filename = @"C:\source\MehType.cs";

var contents = string.Empty;
using (var fs = new FileStream(filename, FileMode.Open))
{
    using (var sr = new StreamReader(fs))
    {
        contents = sr.ReadToEnd();
    }
}

var regex = new Regex(@"(.*?= )(\d+)");
foreach (Match match in regex.Matches(contents))
{
    var num = int.Parse(match.Groups[2].Value);
    contents = contents.Replace(
        match.Value, match.Result("${1}" + --num));
}

using (var fs = new FileStream(filename, FileMode.Create))
{
    using (var sw = new StreamWriter(fs))
    {
        sw.Write(contents);
        sw.Flush();
    }
}

The result is that this…

public enum MehType
{
    Erhmm = 1,
    Glurgh = 2,
    Mfhh = 3
}

…becomes this…

public enum MehType
{
    Erhmm = 0,
    Glurgh = 1,
    Mfhh = 2
}

Author: Adam Prescott

I'm enthusiastic and passionate about creating intuitive, great-looking software. I strive to find the simplest solutions to complex problems, and I embrace agile principles and test-driven development. View all posts by Adam Prescott